The significance of this study is to offer some helpful implications for both vocabulary teaching and vocabulary learning。 Firstly, it’s beneficial for college students to understand the importance of incidental vocabulary acquisition。 Secondly, it can assist teachers to realize the present situation of college students’ vocabulary learning and give students some helpful advice on how to choose reading materials appropriately。 Thirdly, it can provide some information for text compilers to apply different forms of glosses to reading materials to satisfy different readers。

2 Literature Review

2。1 Definition of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition论文网

    Since the early 1960s, some western scholars have put forward with the idea of distinguishing between “language learning” and “language acquisition”。 Making a general survey of these western scholars’ views, language acquisition, especially first language acquisition, is the process of natural assimilation, involving subconscious and unconscious learning, during which the grammatical rules are unnoticed。 “Acquisition” refers to verbal communicative activities in natural language environments which aim at meaningful and real interactions between people。 However, “learning” refers to planned, systematic and conscious mastery of linguistic rules through explaining, practicing or memorizing, which usually happens in a classroom environment and with the guidance of a specialized teacher。 

Nagy, Herman and Anderson (1985) first proposed the term—incidental vocabulary acquisition, on the basis of their research into how children learn native language。 They found that lots of words were learned by repeating appearance in different language environments。 Then Krashen (1985) introduced the term of “incidental vocabulary acquisition” into second language learning。 He pointed out that incidental vocabulary acquisition could happen by receiving ‘comprehensible input’ or by understanding messages according to the Input Hypothesis。 Nation (1990) defined “incidental vocabulary acquisition” as the process of acquiring vocabulary knowledge incidentally when learners’ attention were focused on comprehending the information that a writer or a speaker conveyed。 Huckin and Coady (1999) argued that in incidental vocabulary acquisition, the acquisition of new words was a by-product of cognitive activities that focused on meaning, like reading。 Besides, Laufer and Hulstijn (2001) mentioned that incidental vocabulary acquisition occurred when people were asked to complete an assignment that needed to process information。 

In a word, now the widely accepted definition of the term “incidental vocabulary acquisition” is that language learners acquire vocabulary incidentally when they are performing other learning activities, like listening, reading, etc。 

2。2 Major Approaches to the Study of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition文献综述

Over the years, numerous studies at home and abroad have been done to compare the effects of different glossing types on incidental vocabulary acquisition。 They mainly fixed on three perspectives: studies about multi-mode glossing and single-mode glossing, studies about multiple-choice glossing and single-translation glossing and studies about L1 glossing and L2 glossing。 And in this thesis, I will mainly focus on the studies about L1 glossing and L2 glossing。 Although there are a large number of foreign and domestic researches that are relevant to the effectiveness of different glossing languages on incidental vocabulary acquisition, controversies still exist and no consensus has been reached。 Some researchers drew a conclusion that one type of glosses was more effective than the others, while some suggested that no significant difference existed between L1 and L2 glosses。 In addition, the number of domestic studies in this area is relatively small, comparing with foreign studies。 Following I list some of the typical experiments。